He lets Old Daisy have the next three minutes to herself. Only once does he interject, not meaning to, but unable to halt the shaky sound of a sharply drawn breath as her voice peaks to a terrible warbling crescendo that could strip the trees of their leaves and claw scars across the cold white face of the moon.
Until the night is still again, and even the crickets and frogs seem cowed.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he whispers. “That poor woman. That poor soul. How does . . . is she deformed, is that how . . . ?”
He lets the tape roll awhile longer, with nothing more to add that the infinite night can’t say better, and with a greater sense of awe.
Along the house’s foundation Will had cleared some of the rampant weeds and dirt and build-up of wind-tossed leaves, and still it wanted to not be seen: a rough-hewn door into the earth.
“Storm cellar. Where we’re standing right now is smack dead center in the middle of Tornado Alley,” Paulette said. “You ever see The Wizard of Oz? It’s not like that.”
They cleared away more, untangling the weeds from a heavy chain that held the entrance closed, lashed across the door in a sideways “V” whose point was threaded through a lock nearly the size of his fist, rusted but still sound. Even if they found a key, he doubted it would turn. The chain’s ends were anchored into the door’s hinge plates, and here was the weak spot. The wood along the edges had rotted enough that they were able to tug on the chain to rip up the hinge plates, bolts and all. They heaved the door open, opposite the way it was meant to swing, and the storm cellar exhaled a musty sigh of roots and earth, like the smell of a waiting grave.
“Watch those steps,” Will warned him. “They may not be any sturdier.”
But they held, a dozen of them sloping down to a floor of dry, hard-packed earth and walls so coarsely cut they looked like adobe.
With the door open, enough light spilled down inside for them to see. They barely had room to stand beneath the crude rafters, black with creosote, that kept the hovel above and the tons of soil between from falling through.
He wished it had all failed long ago. He wished they’d never found this place.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” his brother whispered. One trepidatious step at a time, Will moved to where it dwelled along one wall — did it sit? or did it stand? — and when he was close, began to reach.
“Maybe you ought not touch it,” Paulette said.
He stilled his hand. “Why not?”
“Because I wouldn’t.”
Again: “Why not?”
“Maybe I’ve just got more sense than that, I don’t know.”
Clarence was with her on this one. And Will withdrew his hand.
That it was some sort of sculpture was obvious, yet he couldn’t even tell what it was made of, much less what it was meant to represent. It was as tall as he was, with features and symmetry, but far more bulky. To look at it was to understand it had to have come from someplace, been worked by sentient hands, and realize he could never know enough about the world and its shadowed quarters to fathom who or where or why.
Was it metal? Stone? It appeared to be a mixture of both, marbled into each other under the temperatures of a blast furnace. Aspects of it glinted in the light that the rest seemed to swallow.
“A meteorite, maybe?” Will said. “That’s my guess.”
As sculpture, it was pitted and rough, but that it had been shaped at all seemed miraculous. It must have been incomprehensibly hard to work with. Its weight had to be immense. It was contradictory, various parts suggesting man and animal, mammal and mollusk, demon and dragon, a creature fit to dominate anywhere, be it ocean, land, or sky. It was a nightmare rising from a slag heap left over from the formation of the galaxy.
“So nobody else is going to say it?” Will asked. “Okay: ‘I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.’”
But Kansas wasn’t any reference point here. For no reason he could defend, Clarence knew beyond a doubt that this grotesque effigy predated even the idea of Kansas. It predated the nation, maybe the continent, the mountains to the west and the great bisecting river to the east. For all he knew, it came from an epoch when the land was one mass, a single crucible of primal forces surrounded by one titanic sea, the globe like a turbulent eye staring back at the affront of creation.
Then how had it come to be here and now? Perhaps it was as simple as waiting out the eons, impervious to time, until it was unearthed in a field.
He sensed it all in the presence of this thing. The thoughts were in his head as if it had forced them. He couldn’t have been the first.
“We should leave,” he whispered.
“Guys? Check it out.”
Paulette was pointing at the rafters. With their eyes better accustomed to the shadows, they were ready to see what hid in plain sight when the statue was all they were prepared to notice. It was everywhere, on the rafters and the upright timbers bracing the earthen walls and beneath the dust on the steps, a single message repeated over years and decades: COME BACK. Etched into the wood with the points of knives and awls, a thousand utterances of the same plaintive incantation: COME BACK COME BACK COME BACK.
“That thing?” Will jabbed his finger at the statue. “Did she mean that thing? It was real, it was here?”
“I don’t think so.” Paulette cut an impatient glance at him as if she pitied him for his misunderstanding. “I bet she meant her people. Family, friends, neighbors. Her people. Her . . . world.”
Funny. He’d always considered her a loner, a freak who reveled in her isolation.
“Maybe Nana was right after all,” Paulette said. “Maybe it really wasn’t just Old Daisy out here once.”
Will stared at her. “She said there were more like her?”
Paulette nodded. “Nana said there used to be a whole passel of them. This would’ve been way back. Kept their heads down, hid their faces, wore sacks, some of them. Didn’t want to be seen, didn’t want to have anything to do with newer neighbors, didn’t want anyone else even coming close. People like that, they were like moonshiners used to be, and meth cooks now. You learned to steer clear if you didn’t want a load of buckshot coming your way.”
For the moment, Clarence quelled the urge to leave. “You didn’t say anything about this before.”
“Because it wasn’t something I grew up with, all right? Nana never said a thing about it when I was little and she was telling her stories to keep me in line. And she only said it the once. This was after they put her in the home.” Paulette sighed with exasperation. “It wasn’t a serious talk. We were laughing about it, how scared of Daisy she had me. I thought it was just some notion that got in her head after she started to get dotty enough to finally believe her own stories.”
“Maybe,” Clarence said, “she was dotty enough to finally let it slip.”
“If it was even true, they wouldn’t have been people she’d ever seen.
According to her, it was something she heard about from her own grandmother. So we’re talking waaay back. Civil War times, or not long after. There’s no way Old Daisy could’ve been around here since . . .”
She clammed up, not even wanting to say it. Maybe because she could no longer be certain of absolutes, and hated to lie.
Above him, behind him, and all around: COME BACK COME BACK COME BACK.
“Then what happened to the rest of them?”
“That’s probably a dirty old secret that died out with somebody a long time ago.” Paulette looked both solemn and sad. “What do you think? You come from West Virginia. If I’ve heard stories about what used to happen in your mountains there, then I know for sure you must have.”